Ramesh Ponuru, I am repeatedly told, even by people I respect, is a young conservative writer with whom I should become familiar, because he is not the meretricious partisan hack so many of them are. OK, so let's just say he's having a bad day today because, holy crap...

In criticizing an NR editorial, Hannah Groch-Begley of Media Matters can't get through her first sentence without getting something wrong. "The National Review editorial board used the murder conviction of Kermit Gosnell to push for an abortion ban it acknowledges to be unconstitutional that would outlaw all abortions after 20 weeks, even in cases when the health of the mother is at risk." The editorial "acknowledges" no such thing, stating instead that the ban would conflict with Supreme Court decisions that themselves lack constitutional merit. ("The Court should welcome the opportunity to revisit its rulings on the subject, which have been by any measure extreme, to say nothing of their fundamental lack of constitutional merit.")

I mean, what the hell? A ban that conflicts with Supreme Court decisions is nonetheless constitutional because the National Review believes the decisions themselves "lack fundamental constitutional merit"? This, alas, is a road that the National Review went down once before -- delegitimizing Supreme Court decisions it did not like and arguing that, because it did not like them, the decisions themselves were unconstitutional. This did not end well for the magazine's historical reputation, largely because of the folks who held pretty much the same opinion on the role of the Judiciary in constitutional government.